They used to get money from selling products, like Windows. That we are in this situation where they choose to give the OS away for free but then have to scramble to find money in obnoxious ways afterward is bizarre to me. It's not like they started this process with zero market share.
They have a total monopoly on OSes able to run Windows software; this is their strong point: write some random software in 1996, still works today. As a result they can quadruple-dip by having users pay for the OS, show them ads, inflict them unwanted products, and (maybe? if they don't now they surely could without repercussions) sell their data. This is what monopolies do.
The versions that are respectful of users are gated behind "being a company" requirement.
(exception of Windows Server but it's kinda messy to setup for gaming. Though it kinda shows that when they have actual competition on a market they do nice things)
Home users generally don't pay for Windows. It comes with their computers and the major version upgrades are free and have been for quite some time; 7→8 (2012) was the last time it wasn't free but 7→10 (2015) was a valid, free upgrade path so most just bypassed 8 entirely (and they were better off for it because 8 sucked). Since Windows 7 was itself released in 2009, most home users haven't paid for Windows upgrades in 16 years.
Yes, having to maintain an OS over multiple years without recurring revenue might be an issue indeed. On my side I wouldn't mind paying a subscription if the OS could respect my choices. But I guess it does not really make sense to provide a subscription that only a very small handful of people would pay.
(I wonder how subscriptions could handle multiple machines; today it often happens that people have multiple computers but subscription cost would quickly add up; I guess they could have different tiers with different allowed concurrent use count)
I think it's rather that OSA actually visibly affects people in their day-to-day lives whereas other laws don't. I constantly hit age verification pages on Reddit and Twitter and I don't use either for porn. I'm fundamentally against giving Reddit or Twitter or a 3rd party processor my ID just to view content someone somewhere deemed potentially harmful to minors. At least Twitter is done on a post-by-post basis; on Reddit entire subreddits are gated behind age verification.
That's a fair point, but you have to take into consideration the relevant laws and countries. You also need to take into consideration what it means to "operate" in a country.
That's just par for the course in UK culture.
During American criminal trials, the jury is told not to watch the news.
During British criminal trials, the entire British press is legally forbidden from reporting on the trial.
The thing you have to understand is that the average Brit wants and possibly needs the government to tell them how to live their lives. It's a completely foreign paradigm to the average American, though alarming "progress" has been made on the American front as of late.
No. We were typically indifferent to our Government. Very much a case of 'go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over.' But substitute 'tea'.
But in the last couple of decades, things have changed. Arguably, a public referendum in 2016, was very much a protest vote against several Parliaments that didn't listen to its citizens. And the last decade shows nothing has changed.
My friends and family, and myself included, were never very political, and very much a case of 'No Matter Who You Vote For The Government Always Gets In', but now everyone is talking about the Government. Interesting times ahead.
Obviously few would with that framing, but if they're given policies, lots of British people across the political spectrum would support ones that are more paternalistic.
Support for the OSA is very high: https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
British people are much happier with the state being paternalistic, across the political spectrum, it is a very strong differentiator between the US and the UK. "The government should do something!" You can see it in attitudes to the NHS, pensions, welfare. At its peak, in the 70s, 32% of people lived in social housing!
Labour voters, young and old, are generally quite paternalistic. Lots of Conservative voters are too, depending on the flavour. The exceptions are the Lib Dems and some conservative tribes. I am consistently surprised when talking to highly-educated, politically engaged people, left or right, how much the default is that the state should act.
Why won't the government do something is the refrain that everyone including opposing parties are saying. God forbid anyone should take initiative on anything.
And the state keeps on expanding year after year. I cannot remember the last time someone did not promise to shrink the state/government and once elected did a complete 180. It's bonkers.
I am not nor will I ever be a Brit, let alone an average one. But I live here and I have seen and heard things from seemingly average Brits. Would they describe themselves using my exact words? Doubtful. But what other conclusion can one draw from their observed behavior? The Online Safety Act in particular enjoys extraordinarily high support among the general public.
When I talk to people in Britain about sugar-taxes, smoking bans, porn bans, hate-speech laws, etc, most people will explain that without these things people will say/do harmful things therefore the government should stop them.
I remember when they started rolling out biometric facing scanning technology in stores and using it to ban people from all supermarkets within a designated area – basically forcing them to shop in smaller stores without these cameras or get their friends and family to buy their groceries. I thought this was utterly insane but to be horror Brits seem to almost universally support of this stuff because face scanning is a great way to identity people which private companies have flagged high-risk.
Our opinion of others is very low, and are comfort with authoritarianism is relatively high.
They think (like many Americans right now) that it will only be done against ‘those other people’. When they realize it’s been applied to them, it’s too late (they’ve been ‘othered’ now) and people will ignore them - or they’ll have to blame themselves or cover it up in order to fit in.
It’s classic.
Eventually, enough people will have been fucked by it that the numbers will shift back the other way - and then the opposite end of the pathology (not being able to recognize the main groups own needs enough to defend them or pull together as a coherent group) starts building.
It's disturbing to me that so much of this type of legislation originates with the "Conservatives", and the only viable alternative in Labour thinks this type of legislation doesn't go far enough. I guess at least things will be interesting with Farage in Number 10.
It does mean exactly that. If parents want to control what their kids see online they can take control of the situation and limit screen time to where it can be supervised. It might even make sense to have legislation to ensure that that is possible (that schools can't require devices for young children, that device makers need to implement effective parental controls, etc.).
But that's not what the OSA is. Instead it's the government deciding how all kids should be parented. And of course it doesn't just affect the kids now because to be effective all adults need to prove they are not kids to view "harmful" materials, with all the chilling effects and collection of sensitive data that that entails.
> I notice most of the outrage in HN is from foreign entities wanting freedom to push whatever.
Hence the original acknowledgement:
> The thing you have to understand is that the average Brit wants and possibly needs the government to tell them how to live their lives.
I think there’s more difference than there has been since the 1980s. People really underestimate how far the Tory base (and parliamentary party following closely) have shifted to the right. The willingness of sitting Tory MPs to knowingly lie and dissemble on immigration related issues to create heat is a real break from a past consensus.
Current opinion polls for both are abysmal, but I don't think that civic freedoms are the main reason; the main reason is immigration, which all the previous governments promised to limit and then silently decided not to.
Immigration is sucking support more from the tories than labour. They rode into power based upon a promise to do something about it and then massively increased it.
Labour are recently leaning into being anti immigration because it's one of the few wealthy-donor-friendly policies they can pursue which will potentially gain them votes.
Decided not to, but continued to actively campaign on. It’s created a really weird situation where the actual policy choices are hugely disconnected from the rhetoric and emotion in the debate.
Legal immigration from South Asia dominates illegal immigration by an order of magnitude, but nobody wants to lose seats in Birmingham, so essentially doesn’t figure in the arguments about small numbers of afghans in miserable hotels in Essex.
For the Conservatives it's all about irregular/illegal immigration. Labour are hugely unpopular on that having apparently no idea what to do about it but they also have massive challenges on the economy/cost of living and the state of publicly funded services.
My comment provoked you enough to create an account just to make a throwaway insult reply to it. I think perhaps it hit closer to home than you would care to acknolwedge.
As with your initial comment, none of these assertions are correct.
This is not a throwaway account or comment - it is my first and only HN account.
The comment I made was not an insult, but was made to flag the ignorance and stupidity of yours - maybe take a look at the subreddit and see if you can see some parallels. If you have taken it as an insult then that's fine.
Well, I offered my observations and a few people agreed with me to varying degrees. You asserted I'm wrong, ignorant, and stupid. Perhaps that is true; it is not, however, an argument.
Again, none of these statement are true. When you wrote "The thing you have to understand", this is not an observation - it is a statement of objective fact. I never asserted you were ignorant and stupid - I initially implied your comment was, which it objectively is.
I don't think pathologizing an entire nation is a statement of objective fact. Regardless, upon reflection I feel my initial comment was unduly harsh. I think it would be more accurate to say that British society as a whole is very much in favor of the nanny state.
Going by that reasoning someone must be clearly doing something wrong considering they seem to voice their political will at about the same rate as the politically active Americans.
Turnout in the latest presidential/general elections:
2025 German federal election 82.5%
2024 United Kingdom general election 59.7%
2022 French presidential election 73.69%(I)/71.99%(II)
Unfortunately many more people than you might think are in full support of this type of thing. The UK in particular is a very nanny state and this is sold as protecting children. You're not against protecting children, are you?
It is a rhetorical appeal to emotion, which is used to override rational debate, discourage criticism, and create false dichotomies, e.g. "you're either with the children, or you're with criminals".
This "think of the children" rhetoric targets encryption, anonimity, decentralized platforms, and private communication channels like messaging apps, VPNs, Tor, etc. It is nasty. Keep in mind that it does not actually prevent child exploitation and grooming. Most of the pedophiles are on Discord and Roblox anyways.
In any case, there are ways to prove someone is over 18 without revealing identity, but that is not that goal, is it? There are cryptographic schemes just for that, such as zk-SNARK, etc. ZKPs in general.
> Keep in mind that it does not actually prevent child exploitation and grooming.
While true, I'd avoid making that argument since it implies these restrictions might be worth implementing if they actually did prevent child harm. There is no scenario in which it is acceptable for the government to mandate encryption backdoors, for example.
reply